It was July 4th yesterday. Fireworks. I didn’t go down to the waterfront to see them in San Francisco this year, I was in a “place” (that might possibly have served beer) having fun. But it reminded me of this a couple of years ago. On July 4th 2012 the San Diego fireworks display, one of the biggest in the world, detonated… Read More
Author: Paul McLellan
GlobalFoundries Goes to Semicon West
Next week it is Semicon West, the big equipment vendor tradeshow. I love to go since EDA and semiconductor and all the stuff we are interested in here at Semiwiki are driven by equipment capabilities, especially lithography. The highest viewed blogs I write tend to be ones on technologies that are just a bit out beyond the stuff people… Read More
It’s Always Good If the Customer Is Arguing
I’ve never been in sales. Never “carried a bag”. But I have run sales forces and I have spent a lot of time in marketing, guiding sales forces. Well, herding cats comes to mind, but cats don’t have commission plans. Engineers say sales people are emotional, and ego-driven, but change their commission plans… Read More
Synopsys Revamps Formal at #51DAC
Synopsys announced verification compiler a couple of months ago and dropped hints about their static and formal verification. They haven’t announced anything much for a couple of years and it turns out that the reason was that they decided that the technology that they had, some internally developed and some acquired, … Read More
Wally Rhines at #51DAC: EDA Grows From Solving New Problems
Wally Rhines gave the keynote at DAC in 2004. One of the things that he pointed out ten years ago was that EDA revenue for any given market segment is pretty much flat once the initial growth phase has taken place and the market has been established. Incremental EDA revenue only comes from delivering new capabilities. Historically… Read More
Cliff Hou’s DAC Keynote
Cliff Hou had two major appearances at DAC this year. He gave the opening day keynote…and he wrote the forward to Dan and my bookFabless: the Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry which about 1500 lucky people got a copy of courtesy of several companies, most notably eSilicon who sponsored the Tuesday evening post-conference… Read More
A Brief History of QuickLogic
Quicklogic was founded in 1988 as a fables semiconductor company supplying anti-fuse devices. In fact VLSI Technology, where I was working at the time, was their foundry.
Although today anti-fuse is often used as a generic word for one-time-programmability, the origins of the name are grounded in reality. In a fuse, like the things… Read More
Five Things You Don’t Know About MunEDA
So first the one thing that you do know. MunEDA are based in Munich which makes them German. I have to confess that until I got involved helping them a bit with some marketing stuff that that was about all I knew about them too.
So now five things that you might not know:
1. MunEDA have a much wider customer list that you know and would even… Read More
National Semiconductor Education in the Cloud
“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” wrote Wordsworth. Well, clouds are pretty lonely in EDA these days. Despite some of the advantages on paper that mean that companies from salesforce.com to Netflix make heavy use of cloud-computing, semiconductor design has barely touched the cloud. One exception was Nimbic (acquired… Read More
Sensor Hub and Wearable Gestures
One of the challenges with the internet of things (IoT) is that many devices are both always on and battery powered (and not with a large battery). The responsibilities need to be split so that the device senses when it needs to wake up without requiring the application processor to be waking up all the time to make the decision since… Read More
Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing